( As John to Patmos by Derek Walcott from In a Green Night: Poems 1948 - 1960)

The West Indies are a group of islands lying in an arc between Florida in the US and the Venezuelan coast of South America. Europeans came to the region in the 15th century looking for spices, gold, silver and precious stones. Christopher Columbus believed the world was round and that by travelling westward, he could eventually reach the East. When he made his first landfall in the 'New World' in 1492, he was sure he had reached the East by this western route, so he named the islands the 'West Indies' and the people he found there 'Indians'.

The area came to be called the Caribbean, after the Caribs, one of the Taino peoples who, along with the Arawaks, had migrated from Central and South America, and were among the first people to live on the West Indian islands.

On his second voyage in 1493, Columbus was accompanied by a larger number of Spaniards who hoped to settle in Hispaniola, the island now split between Haiti and Dominican Republic, and to become farmers there. From Hispaniola, the Spaniards spread out to take over other islands. Farming developed and the rearing of pigs and cattle began to produce goods for export. More importantly, it was becoming clear that there was wealth to be gained from cultivation of the sugar-cane plant, and the Spaniards began to use Indian labour to get the most profitable results.

By the 16th century, the indigenous population was in decline. Made to work as slaves by the Spaniards, many were killed by beatings, starvation and overwork, while others died of the diseases introduced by the Europeans. By the 17th century the English had established sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to maintain production a continuous supply of cheap labour was essential. To start with, the Caribs had been replaced by white European indentured labourers, men and women bound to work for a certain length of time in return for transportation and their keep, but as labourers the Europeans were notably unsuccessful.

Over 10 million Africans were taken to the New World, while investors in the slave trade made huge profits.

The British abolished trading in slaves in 1807, and 30 years later, the British parliament abolished slavery altogether. Emancipation, however, created the need for new sources of labour in the Caribbean.

From 1845 onwards, hundreds of thousands of Guyana, indentured immigrants from India arrived at the request of the planters in the British colonies - Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada and St. Vincent. The plantation owner did not own his indentured labourer, the money he was paid could not cover his upkeep. The Indian was therefore perpetually in debt, and could never leave. Consequently many were malnourished, and the ill treatment they received on the plantations led to an alarming number of deaths.

Although the traffic in indentured Indians was suspended twice in the 19th century, and the system of indentureship was repeatedly called into question, there was still a steady flow of Indian migrants until the early 20th century. Growing public and political pressure from Indians persuaded the British government to end the system in 1917. By then, thousands of Indians had married and settled in the agricultural heartlands of the British Caribbean, which they began to transform into viable cocoa plantations and food-producing areas. Other Asians, mostly from China, were introduced to the Caribbean in this period.

By the beginning of the 20th century the Caribbean islands were an assembly of ethnicities and nationalities, a melting pot of cultures and languages. The history of the region and social relations within it, however, made the Caribbean different from any of the other colonies. Indeed, there were three crucial factors which determined everything about Caribbean life up until the middle of the 20th century, when the most recent wave of migration to Britain took place.

Firstly, the Europeans and European governments - Spain, Holland, France and Britain - had settled the region and having more or less exterminated the original inhabitants were it's first foreign landlords. Secondly, the bulk of the population had arrived by force, during the period of slavery. Thirdly, the dominant economic activity was the production of one crop - sugar cane.

Slavery and indentured labour was central to all these factors, and it is impossible to understand Caribbean attitudes, beliefs and even the continuing relationship of Caribbean people to the region, without understanding the nature of slavery in the region. Slavery was more than a phase in the region's history, or a part of its activity. It was, for a period, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the prime reason why anyone was there, and it determined almost every element of the region's culture.

The populations of the African continent, from which the slaves came, were extremely varied in ethnicity, culture and language. Most slaves had been forcibly separated from anyone with whom they could communicate, let alone anyone who shared their family or their ethnic background. By definition, the life they created, (language, culture or family) was never a matter of choice. In the Caribbean there were even a few farms, notably in the Eastern Caribbean which produced slaves for sale. All this had immense and enduring consequences on every aspect of Caribbean life and culture. Preserving a native language would have presented severe practical difficulties, even if slaves hadn't been compelled to speak the language of their masters. But finding someone else who spoke the same language was practically impossible, so the dominance of European languages such as French and Spanish but particularly English, was both necessary and inevitable.

Slaves were named by their masters. In a generation original names were forgotten. Those who had been bred, or sold away from their mother might never know their names in any case. For a time, the fashion among owners was to give their slaves classical names: Caesar, Pompey, Ovid. In French islands the ironical use of the word 'king' or 'roi' was popular, which gave rise to the name Leroy, but by and large, slaves were known by the names of people who owned the estates where they lived, which is why Caribbean families generally have European names.

The extensively mixed race population of the Caribbean is also accounted for by the customs surrounding slavery. African women were not regarded as individuals with choices about their partners. They were the property of their masters, and by the ethos of the time their bodies were available to all Europeans, who held the power of life or death at a whim. By the end of slavery a racially mixed population was a permanent fact of life in the Caribbean. Look at nineteenth century slave registers from Antigua.

The vice regal group outside the governor's residence in St. Andrew Hills in Jamaica (1891). Moving Here catalogue reference (RGS) S0001666

Despite the formal abolition of slavery, colonial rule in the Caribbean ensured that economic activity and social relationships remained very similar on a day to day level. Most of the former slaves not occupied in domestic service or legally bound to the sugar estates, cultivated small plots of land to supply their own needs and began fostering the internal market which had begun to form even during slavery. But the economy was largely geared to supplying an external market, and every aspect of life echoed the hierarchy of slavery, with local or expatriate Britons firmly in control.

In any case many former slaves refused to work on the estates which had been the site of their servitude, and it was obvious that a more reliable source of labour was needed. From 1845 onwards, hundreds of thousands of indentured immigrants from India arrived at the request of the planters in the British colonies - Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana and St. Vincent.

In the Caribbean, the African descended majority had no pre-existing claims on the land, no widely accepted institutions which predated slavery and no historical continuity before their arrival in the region. Therefore national identity had to be created from scratch, and using only what was available. Given the polyglot nature of the community and their total isolation from previous custom and practice, the Black majority in the Caribbean territories ruled by Britain had no alternative but to echo and mirror the life of the British.

In practice the Africans created a rich cultural life based on customs and habits preserved or remembered from their background in Africa. In the day to day routine of Caribbean life, religious rituals and beliefs, musical skills, and agricultural methods all sprang from this foundation of African experience. It can be convincingly argued, for instance, that the plantation system, which provided the profits of the 18th and 19th century, would have been impossible without the agricultural and craft skills which the Africans brought to its development.

On the other hand, the Caribbean had emerged from slavery with no widely accepted native feast days, no traditional common language, no established cultural or political forms. Local festivals like the Trinidad carnival, Jonkonnu, or the masquerade tradition, were established by the time of emancipation. Nevertheless, these festivals did not symbolise a unifying belief system or a coherent national will. Instead, they outlined a tradition of nostalgia, which was part of a culture of escape from the oppressive dominance of the European rulers: and they were permitted, partly because they acted as a safety valve for popular discontent and resentment, without offering a real challenge to the social hierarchy. The most subversive cultural forms, like obeah (obee-yah), a mixture of animist beliefs and magic, went underground to become part of largely hidden folk tradition.

The only form of education, which was permitted during slavery and for some time after, was the proselytising and conversion offered by missionaries. So Caribbeans were obliged to adopt and adapt the forms available: Christmas, Easter and hymn singing became absorbed into the culture of the region, and while much is made in the present day of African survivals in the language, it is arguable that Caribbean dialects are as much branded by the vocabulary of 17th century English and their borrowings from other European and Asian languages.

(From Memories of Island Life Exhibition, 2002)

Everything in Caribbean culture displays this forced adaptation and the influence of several cultures mingling, from the time of slavery and the days of early settling. Caribbean food, for instance, features salted and preserved meat and fish, dried peas and beans, chilli peppers, pasties and pastries of various kinds, all of them dating back to the days of sailing ships when food was imported in bulk and had to be preserved for long periods of time. The Caribbean's favourite dish, saltfish, was brought to the region by the 17th century Portuguese who caught cod off Newfoundland, then dried and salted it, before export. Yet the Caribbean is a region whose waters teem with fish.

This also demonstrates the economics of colonialism. Everything came from the centre, Britain, and was returned there in the form of capital or marketable goods. In different circumstances the Caribbean might have been capable of creating an economy which traded its resources with the rest of the world on equal terms, but the point of European colonialism had always been to retain control of the way that goods were produced and sold. The Caribbean economy, therefore, was a marginal by-product of a colonial process which restricted and shaped its development. After independence, a series of Caribbean politicians and commentators, notably the Jamaican Prime Minister, Michael Manley, condemned the evolution of the Caribbean and other colonial economies and called for a 'New World Order'. Read about the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica.

Caribbean people were engaged in a close relationship with Britain and British culture for hundreds of years before 20th century migration. There was no substantial population of white settlers, as there was for instance in South Africa to provide a counterpoint to native national identity and embody British culture as distinct from the form of British culture that evolved in the Caribbean. Equally, in comparison with West African countries, there was no formal network of alternative beliefs, religion, language or politics. So in the British Caribbean Islands people embraced British culture, largely because there was no alternative. Read reports from The League of Coloured Peoples submitted to the West India Royal Commission in 1939. They deal with the state of Caribbean society, particularly with reference to the economy, medicine and the legal system.

Education at both primary and secondary levels, for example, were dominated by a tradition of church and mission schools based on a similar network to that in England. Download and listen to Gloria Williams reminiscences of growing up in 1930s Jamaica. By and large, they taught the same syllabus to be found in an English school. There was no domestic publishing industry and Caribbean populations were in any case too small to support the infrastructure it would have required. There was, therefore, no alternative structure of education about a pre-existing native culture, because in formal terms, such a thing did not exist. Read the 1938 West India Royal Commission report on social and economic conditions in Barbados, British Honduras, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago.

Since everything about the Caribbean cultures was adopted or adapted from elsewhere, the region as a whole did not develop the kind of nationalism and national feeling evident in Asian or African countries, until the middle of the 20th century. Some of the well known political figures of the region, such as Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and CLR James achieved recognition by leaving it and focusing on the struggles of African Americans and African liberation. Typically, throughout most of Caribbean history, its people saw this process of leaving the region as a positive step by which talented people could engage with the wider world, rather than as a rejection or betrayal.

In much the same way, Caribbean people had always travelled abroad to find work or educational opportunities. Until the period after the Second World War the favoured destination was the USA, although British West Indians worked in every country around the region. After the war, however, the situation altered. To begin with, the USA passed legislation which limited West Indians' former ease of entry. Secondly, the veterans of the war in Europe spread the news about the availability of work in the UK. Finally, the prospect of political independence created an atmosphere of anxiety for most Caribbeans who did not belong to the groups of political activists. The Caribbean Federation had collapsed in 1961 and was formally dissolved in 1962, as a result of inter island rivalries, and, for many Caribbeans the thought of being locked in the region without any prospect of secure employment was intolerable.

Many people believe that Caribbean people were lured to Britain by government sponsored offers of employment. In fact Caribbean migration was due to a much more complex combination of social, economic and political factors. The truth is that there were only two sources of recruitment. One was London Transport, the other was the hospitals. Only 4,400 people arrived (from Barbados) as a direct result of the London Transport scheme, and while thousands of nurses arrived during the major tranche of migration, this was merely a continuation of recruitment by individual hospitals and regions which had already been in place.

Caribbean migration to Britain, was simply the logical conclusion of Caribbean history and Caribbean life up to the midpoint of the 20th century. The historical, economic, social, cultural and linguistic relationship with Britain had created and shaped the region. The hopeless economic conditions of the islands pushed its people outwards rather than holding them in place, and for a group of nations, which had been called into existence by Britain, migration to Britain was, in a sense, like coming home.